Tenors of the Time
Imitation may be the sincerest form of flattery but in jazz – with its built-in requirement to improvise and be fresh and new and otherwise put yourself out there each time on stage – imitation is often problematic. For in the jazz world the historical continuum has amounted to a tradition of change and progression, and one dare not transgress. It' also a family in which musical greats are casually referred to by their first names or nicknames by peers and fans alike; thus many young musicians inherit the legacies of in-laws they never knew personally.
The lives of Joshua Redman and Branford Marsalis – who perform at the Montreal International Jazz Festival starting next week – are informed by familial ties that they must simultaneously transcend yet never lose sight of. Regarded as among the elite young saxophone players of the last 20 years, Redman and Marsalis arrive at the jazz festival with their most ambitious and artistically successful albums in tow. The albums are surveys of their spiritual and stylistic states of mind, and they unstintingly tackle the conundrums of carving out individuality while acknowledging the ongoing inspiration of earlier masters. In Redman's case it is Sonny Rollins, in Marsalis' it is John Coltrane, and in both cases there are immediate family legacies to consider.
Redman's first acoustic studio album in six years, Back East, comes after the death in 2005 of his father, Dewey Redman, the underappreciated tenor great who made jazz history in major stints with Ornette Coleman and Keith Jarrett. Marsalis' Braggtown comes after Hurricane Katrina wiped away much of New Orleans, America's proverbial cradle of jazz (with the Marsalis family among its musical treasures), and it's an affirmation of his personal place in its history, after years in the shadow of his more famous younger brother Wynton.
Then again, they've always had a lot to live up to, and they've both handled the pressures with a state of grace that's inspiring to the generation coming up under them. That's where the rising Montreal saxophonist Chet Doxas comes in, with a headlining show at the festival and a familial history of his own.
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Joshua Redman laughs when he says Back East is the most conceptual album of his career. "I mean, I really abhor concept albums. For me as a musician, it's very dangerous if the concept dictates the music. I think that to the extent that concepts exist, they should somehow spring organically from the musical and creative process. In fact, when I started writing, I didn't set out with all these ideas of investigating the dichotomies of east and west or exploring my influences and having references to my mother and my father. It was basically: I'd like to to a trio album, with just bass and drums – that was a concept enough." But you can't go through tenor trio albums without listening to Sonny Rollins, which led to a rediscovery of his classic 1957 L.A. date Way Out West. "I found myself engaging somewhat more explicitly with some of my influences, whether it's Sonny or Coltrane or Getz or Wayne Shorter. That included the guest saxophonists (Joe Lovano, Chris Cheek and his father Dewey) who were also influences, and then exploring these ideas of east and west. I'd like to believe that there was always a litmus test: Is this musically sound? If there's a concept here at work, is it something that serves the music and is coming from the music as opposed to wrapping the music."
Consider the album's title, Back East, as a delicious play on words: his tune conveys a downtown go-cat-go kineticism reflexively recalling New York – which is the West in the eyes of Arabs and those we westerners once called orientals. In this spirit, Redman includes an insouciant jumpy version of the hoary western dog I'm an Old Cowhand, made famous jazz-wise by Rollins, that most New York of players and a large influence on Redman growing up in the People's Republic of Berkeley. Meanwhile, the venerable Wagon Wheels becomes a doppelganger for Swing Low Sweet Chariot. There's an elegantly trippy East of the Sun (and West of the Moon), which Charlie Parker used to play with strings. He switches to soprano to evoke a twisted Middle Eastern aura (snake-charmer meets krazy-kat) in Zarafah, an ode to his Jewish mother.
The album's penultimate tune is father and son trading phrases, almost melding as one with the sum of their differences, on India by John Coltrane, the spiritual father of jazz musicians today. The finale has Joshua laying out completely while Dewey plays GJ, which comes across posthumously as a kind of life summation, stately and impassioned – backed by his kid's rhythm section. That includes drummer Ali Jackson and Brad Mehldau's bassist Larry Grenadier, both of whom Redman played and recorded with in the mid-1990s. The sense of jazz continuum is conveyed with keen intelligence, a deft touch and humour. Redman is having a ball playing with history, a spirit that serves the concepts well.
"These themes of east and west running throughout the album are not cut and dried, and that's kind of the whole point. I'm not trying to provide any definitions, I'm trying almost to pose questions and in some cases subvert definitions or confuse things a little bit. There's a west and east dichotomy in terms of the United States, but also in the larger sense of western culture and eastern culture, western and non-western musics. Take a tune like Wagon Wheels, which kind of quintessentially evokes images of the wild west and cowboys but gets a kind of middle-eastern treatment.
"While there is some truth behind these categories and labels, they are also constructs with a lot of artifice. The more you focus on them, the more grotesque they become and the less truth there is."
Redman was born in 1969 and grew up in Berkeley, California with his Russian-Jewish mother, the dancer Renée Chedroff, after his father had run off to play with his hometown free-jazz hero Ornette Coleman (which gives Back East's 1968 Coleman liner-note quote "New York is now!" added resonance). The son famously gave up law school at Yale (he was summa cum laude from Harvard) for the precarious career opportunities afforded by the jazz life. Gary Giddens, the veteran Village Voice jazz critic who hosted the 1991 Thelonious Monk International Jazz Competition where Redman showed his stuff, was blown away by the young player's wisdom and humanity (which he described as "preserving my roots while extending my branches"):
"He knew the changes, but played them from inside. He had the demeanor of a musician who has transcended the need to merely show off his speed or his circular breathing or his multiphonics. He played music instead of technique. But now he would face a very different sort of challenge: facing down the lure of the star makers ... Redman's candid willingness to communicate his joy in playing is as enchanting as his extraordinary talent. In forging that communal glow, he makes it easy to forget that jazz is often characterized as an elitist music. But he also portends the thin line between expressiveness and flash ..."
Nothing's really changed since then: Redman, now 38, has outlived the "young-lions" tag that saddled players coming up a dozen or so years ago with ridiculous expectations that had nothing to do with music. On Back East he quotes a Coltrane interview in Japan in 1966: "The truth itself does not have any name on it. And each man has to find it for himself."
Above all, Back East is a perfect model of presenting socio-cultural elements in a personal creative context. After a decade in New York, he moved back to the Bay Area with a plan to return to the Big Apple after a stint as director of the SF Jazz Collective. "When I originally went back it wasn't under the best of circumstances, breaking up with my wife and such. I didn't really want to go back but I thought it was the right thing to do. but I found after a few years in the Bay Area that I found I could enjoy the advantages of living out there and the good life and still stay focused musically. Being out of the intensity and activity of New York was my concern, my ability to stay focused and motivated. I actually found that with more space, more physical physical space and psychological space, I was able to focus more musically."
His life has changed. He's now the father of a 2-year-old son, and it's good to be with his mother again. He counts himself fortunate enough to document his last musical meeting with Dewey Redman before he passed away. This occurred after his Redman Sr.'s memorable date at the Gesù at Pat Metheny's invitation series two years ago. "I remember seeing Pat not so long afterwards and he said it was great playing with Dad again and that Dad played great."
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For Branford Marsalis jazz is all about spirituality, and he takes it personal, having grown up New Orleans. "The s-word is avoided in much music discussion these days, but jazz has its own spirituality.
"People born in the south were raised with a certain religiosity, and almost all those great jazz musicians up to the 1970s were informed by church upbringing. There's a social aspect of going to church and also an important tenet of faith - a conviction in the belief without a shred of proof – that really translates well into jazz. I think ultimately that's what swing is, which is why people who were born in more secular environments have such a tough time dealing with the concepts of swing and of playing jazz. Secularists like to believe, like some scientists, that everything that is real is some thing you can touch and create – yet the greatest examples of beauty are beyond our comprehension and cannot be codified. There are those who would devalue those experiences compared to matters more technical in nature, and I feel sorry for them.
"When I was growing up in New Orleans when we would talk about songs, and sing the songs to one another. When I got to New York we were reciting chord changes to one another. It's a very different experience. I had never really experienced that until I moved to New York, so for the first 20 years of my life I did not know that people did that!" Live and learn.
Growing up in Coltrane's towering shadow is a fact of life for younger saxophonists, something Marsalis, who turns 47 in August, acknowledges in Braggtown's invigorating opening jaunt, but it's something he says he has a hard time explaining. "They were interviewing the clarinetist Michael White about Alvin Baptiste's legacy (after the great New Orleans composer's death recently), and that will best explain what I've always believed in, because I've never explained it the right way, it would take too long. He said: 'Alvin Baptiste grew up immersed in the New Orleans tradition, but he was not a traditionalist. He used the tradition to further inform him in all his musical adventures.' The people who slavishly copy Coltrane would actually interpret the music a lot better if they listened to the music Coltrane listened to as a kid, or try to understand the social element of his music and not just the harmonics. Once you understand the spiritual intent then you can play like somebody without using the exact notes they use, and it frees you from being stuck in paradigm hell.
"Now that I've been working on my technique and am a better technical player, all that work I did on musical sensibility is really starting to pay off."
That much is evident in the perfectly paced 75-minute program of Braggtown, the 2006 album that pairs the explosiveness of his quartet with ear-opening revelations of sensibility and technique. Between 14-minute-plus balls-out improv jaunts that develop with jailbreak intensity and sensitive chamber-music-like set pieces, Marsalis takes full advantage of the CD length. He traverses an outward bound twilight zone traversed in Blackzilla, all darting sharp ping pong angles with pianist Joel Calderazzo shining on the rhythmic precipice, then follows up by reworking Henru Purcell's stately O Solitude. This is an album that sucks you in immediately, yet also gives you time to breathe.
Marsalis became one of those rare jazz musicians to play to an audience of millions nightly during his stint as musical director of the Tonight Show with Jay Leno in the mid-90s, a job he walked away from after two years. The career opportunity raised eyebrows among some in the jazz press, to which Marsalis claims, "I don't read press, I read books, so I would not have noticed."
But press him and he spells out his feelings about the Hollywood experience loud and clear: "None of my friends were hostile to the idea, they seemed kind of cool. When we started having them sit-in with the band when they put their records out, then they were really cool about it. The Tonight Show was never about playing music – playing music is about playing music. It was just an opportunity to try out being in one stationary place over a period of time. I had never been on television to that degree before, and the only way you're going top find out whether you're suited for a job is to try it. I didn't what to be in one of those situations where you're sitting around ten years later saying, 'I wonder what that would've been like.' The most important part was that if it didn't suit me I could just leave. That's the way I treated it.
"I mean, there was all this stuff written about me being mad because I didn't get to play jazz. That was absolute fabrication, a spin created by somebody in the office to control the story. They want you to say you're leaving to spend more time with your family and then word starts sneaking out about something else. Show business is a big game, and there are a lot of people who make a very good living off it. They tried to control the perception of me leaving and, you know, that was fine. I was a little irritated but I was finally able to understand what that game is. The important thing for me was just get back to playing music, because that was the thing that I really missed."
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Chet Doxas, at 27 and with a debut album, Sidewalk Etiquette, under his belt, is enjoying the international beginnings of his promising career. He's experiencing the rush and classic "hangs" playing recently in big-bands in Europe or jamming in New York City, where he spent time on a study grant. He speaks with a certain awe over the leadership skills of Marsalis and Redman, although he's a young veteran of the Montreal club scene, leading and participating in sessions at Biddles, Upstairs and other bistros. Jazz is in the family: he's played with his drummer brother Jim in bands since childhood and bassist Zack Lober since high school (both are in his present band, which is completed by pianist John Roney, who will lead the jam sessions at the Hyatt Recency Hotel this year). His father George Doxas is also a well-known educator (who retired this week after lobbying to make Lindsay High School an arts-intensive institution), choir master, and owner of one of the most well-equipped home recording studios in town.
"When I think about what happens on stage, it's pretty much a utopian sense of how the world can run. If you look at how music works and why it sounds right, I think it comes down to trust among people and an acceptance of being very open-minded. Usually the best improvisors and players are pretty special people. I don't think great music can happen without compassion. I feel there's so much to learn about life from music."
The first thing to listen for is the truth of the moment. "Whether they're musically educated or not, most people can always feel the honesty of something. I think that's why Keith Jarrett is so well-respected, above everything else he's an incredibly honest compassionate player. Coltrane played some pretty heavy shit, yet you can hear the vulnerability or child-like quality of really putting himself out there. That's one quality the greats, like Paul Bley and Jimmy Guiffre, all have in common. It's a language they use to speak to each other, like a great conversation."
Growing up with his father's vast record collection, the first albums to make a big impression on Doxas were the Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong duet albums and the 1968 Thelonious Monk album Underground. Among current saxophonists, Marsalis was his man.
"You grow out of this phase of imitation and emulation, and graduate to a way of being inspired by the individuality of the masters. I have so much respect for their dedication to being themselves, bettering themselves as artists and as people, which I think go hand in hand. The lessons you learn from them is that instead of imitating them it's better to imitate their dedication to the music. I think that's more noble than what they played."
The challenge for jazz attracting an audience among the young, says Doxas, is to get people away from their computers and into clubs and halls.
"Jazz is such a live art form but there's so much going on in technology that suggests otherwise. There's so much music being heard over the Internet, with MySpace and downloading sites, that I don't think this aspect bodes as well for jazz as some of the pop stuff. Take this producer Timberland – the guy is amazing for what he does. I can't believe how far this stuff has come, and I don't think jazz can hold much of a candle to drawing new younger listeners from the aesthetics of recorded production like that.
"But sit people down to some contemporary jazz and it's another experience," he says, pointing to the highly educated young European audiences he's encountered recently. "Once you get them there, you get a lot of response for jazz because of the honesty thing coming through. You can't categorize that. You sort of put yourself out there bigtime."
BRANFORD MARSALIS ON NEW ORLEANS:
Branford Marsalis is honorary chair of the New Orleans Habitat for Humanity, and conceived the idea of the Habitat Musicians' Village under construction in the city's historic Ninth Ward. Here he gives his own prognosis for his hometown in the wake of Hurricane Katrina:
"New Orleans was basically relegated to the same situation Dresden was after World War II. The city wasn't firebombed out of existence but over 60 percent of its homes were rendered useless. I think that the standards by which people expect rebuilding have no basis in historical precedent. Homes can be built, all looking like each other, in a staggeringly short period of time, and we can cook food in 5 minutes, but we have an overall level of impatience and understanding as to what it takes to rebuild. We haven't had anything of this magnitude ever, so people's expectations are incredibly naive. Add to that a staunchly Democratic city and state with a Republican administration that is openly hostile towards those who don't think like them, and add to that a war that's been devastating to the public trust regardless of ideology. George Bush is basing his legacy on war and not the flood."
Flood relief is "definitely slowed because of the ineptitude of local officials in Louisiana. A lot of the people complaining about the systemic corruption and the apathy used to say that was the charm on New Orleans. Now people say it's terrible - well, it's always been terrible. Hopefully this will hold public officials to their word, and make them accountable.
"Americans have an insatiable appetite for calamity, tragedy, stupidity and garbage and it's a miracle if any of these stories get a two-week life span because there's no end to the amount of garbage and calamity. New Orleans actually got a full year of coverage, phenomenal considering the tsunami got no more than three weeks. People have a short attention span for these things, which allows officials to make promises they don't intend to keep. And the beat goes on, so it goes ..."